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Monday, 4 May 2009

Defend Omar Barghouti against Zionist McCarthyism

Omar Barghouti is a Palestinian with permanent rights of residency in Israel. He isn’t an Israeli national because there is no such thing. Most people are not aware of this simple fact. There is no such thing as Israeli nationality because Zionist ideology deems that Israel is merely the state of the Jewish people, wherever they live.

So the author of this blog is entitled to go to Israel, to ‘return’ to a State in which he has never lived, and claim citizenship, whereas Arabs born in Israel have no such rights. Omar Barghouti is therefore a tolerated member of a society which is a ‘Jewish’ State.

But Omar has broken a key rule of Israeli society. Omar Barghouti is also one of the most vociferous and outspoken supporters of a Boycott of Israeli institutions. As such he has committed a cardinal sin for which he is now under attack. Instead of keeping his head down, his mouth shut and being grateful for being able to live and study in the land of his birth, he is politically outspoken, opposed to a racist ‘Jewish’ state and an active campaigner. To the Zionist far-right (and today most Zionist parties are on the far-right) this is intolerable.

In particular Zionists have now started to demand that Omar be expelled from Tel Aviv University where he is taking a doctorate. Apparently he is hypocritical for supporting an academic boycott of Israel’s racist universities whilst at the same time studying at them. Superficially of course this is an attractive argument. If victims of racial and national oppression demand a Boycott of their oppressors they should also participate in that Boycott.

Of course this is a nonsense. The purpose of the Boycott, Disinvestment and Sanctions campaign against Israel is not to make the plight of Palestinians inside and outside Israel even worse but to redress the balance. It is to put pressure on business, academia etc. not to discriminate, to abandon the idea of a State based on racial criteria and instead transform into a non-racial unitary state in what was Mandate Palestine.

No doubt the racists who are targeting Omar would have demanded that Blacks in South Africa should have boycotted their own access to South African institutions too. In fact we recognise that no Israelis can boycott their own participation in Israeli society. What we do is try to exert pressure from outside Israel to force Israeli society to change, since internal reform is impossible. This is exactly what happened in South Africa. Indeed, because Boycott is a sophisticated instrument, we do not demand a Boycott of anti-Zionist and anti-racist Israeli Jews. It is not because someone is Israeli that we demand a Boycott but because they are willing participants in oppression.

We therefore call for the defence of Omar Barghouti against the racist attacks being made upon him. It is a clear sign of the growing success of the BDS movement.

The impressive growth of the Palestinian civil society campaign for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel, particularly after its criminal war of aggression on the occupied Gaza Strip, is testimony to the morality and consistency of ordinary citizens and civil society organizations around the world concerned about restoring Palestinian rights and achieving justice for Palestinians.

The most recent achievement of the Israel boycott movement was the adoption of BDS-- nearly by consensus -- by the Scottish Trade Union Congress [1], following the example set by the Congress of South African Trade Unions, COSATU [2] and the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, ICTU [3].

In despair over their evident inability to stop or even hold back the growing tide of BDS across the globe, Israel apologists have resorted to an old tactic at which they seem to excel: witch hunts and smear campaigns. A self-styled McCarthyist academic monitor group in Israel has launched a petition calling for the expulsion of Omar Barghouti, a founding member of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI), from Tel Aviv University, where he is enrolled as a doctoral student. The Israeli campaign urges the university administration to expel Barghouti due to his leading role in the BDS movement that calls for boycotting Israel and all institutions complicit in its occupation and apartheid

To date, more than 65,000 persons have reportedly signed this right-wing Israeli petition that depicts Barghouti as an “especially strident and persuasive voice” against Israeli colonial and racist policies. Several media columns by Zionist journalists in Israel and the United Kingdom, among others, have tried to use the “revelation” that Barghouti, “now enrolled” at an Israeli university, is politically inconsistent for calling for the boycott of all Israeli academic institutions while he is a student at one of them. Other than the clear dishonesty and underhandedness of these same media in presenting the case as if Barghouti has just -- or recently -- enrolled in an Israeli university despite themselves having reported years ago that he was already enrolled then [4], the reports have made some glaring omissions about the Israeli apartheid context, the widely endorsed criteria of the PACBI boycott, and the system of racial discrimination in Israel’s educational system against the indigenous Palestinians.

While consistently calling upon academics around the world to boycott Israel and its academic -- and cultural -- institutions due to their entrenched collusion in the state’s colonial and apartheid policies [5], PACBI has never called upon Palestinian citizens of Israel and those who are compelled to carry Israeli identification documents, like Palestinian residents of occupied Jerusalem, to refrain from studying or teaching at those Israeli institutions. That would have been an absurd position, given the complete lack of alternatives available. Successive Israeli governments, committed to suppressing Palestinian national identity in their pursuit of maintaining Israel’s character as a racist state, have made every effort possible to prevent the establishment of a Palestinian university inside Israel. The only choice left to Palestinian students and academics in Israel, then, is to go to an Israeli university or leave their homeland to pursue their studies or academic careers abroad -- often not possible due to financial or other compelling reasons. In fact, the Israeli authorities have consistently worked to strip Palestinians from occupied Jerusalem of their Israeli ID cards and thus their residency rights while they study abroad, thereby prohibiting them from returning.

Palestinians in Israel are treated as second-class citizens in every vital aspect of life and are subjected to a system of “institutional, legal and societal discrimination,” as admitted even in US State Department reports on human rights [6]. In the field of education this discrimination is dominant throughout the system, as the following conclusion from a ground-breaking Human Rights Watch study published in 2001 states:

“The hurdles Palestinian Arab students face from kindergarten to university function like a series of sieves with sequentially finer holes. At each stage, the education system filters out a higher proportion of Palestinian Arab students than Jewish students. ... . And Israel‘s courts have yet to use ... laws or more general principles of equality to protect Palestinian Arab children from discrimination in education.” [7]

Palestinians, like any people under apartheid or colonial rule, have insisted on their rights, including their right to education, even if the only venues available were apartheid or colonial institutions. Nelson Mandela studied law at the Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg, one of the most notorious apartheid institutes then. Similarly, leaders of the anti-colonial resistance movement in India and Egypt, among many other countries, received their education at British universities at the height of the colonial era.

PACBI has always made a distinction between the forms and range of academic boycott it urges the world to adopt and what Palestinians themselves can implement. The former have a moral choice to boycott Israeli universities in order to hold them accountable for their shameful, multifaceted complicity in perpetuating the occupation and racist policies of the state; the latter are often left with no choice but to use the services of the oppressive state, to which they pay taxes.

Finally, we stress that it is precisely PACBI’s five-year-old record of moral and political consistency and the growing influence of its principles and the campaigns it and its partners have waged around the world that have provoked Zionist anti-boycott forces to try, yet again, to rehash old attacks of inconsistency, failing to understand or intentionally and deceptively ignoring the boycott criteria set by PACBI. We urge all academics, academic unions, cultural figures and cultural associations to adopt whatever creative form of BDS their context allows them. This remains the most effective and morally sound form of solidarity with the Palestinian people in our struggle for freedom, dignity, equality and self determination.

Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI)PACBI@PACBI.orgwww.PACBI.org[1] http://bdsmovement.net/?q=node/376[2] http://www.pacbi.org/etemplate.php?id=271[3] http://www.bdsmovement.net/?q=node/20[4] See for example: http://www.israel21c.org/bin/en.jsp?enDispWho=Views%5El181&enPage=BlankPage&enDisplay=view&enDispWhat=object&enVersion=0&enZone=Views[5] http://www.pacbi.org/etemplate.php?id=869[6] http://www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/irf/2008/108484.htm[7] Human Rights Watch, Second Class: Discrimination Against Palestinian Arab Children in Israel‘s Schools, September 2001. http://www.hrw.org/reports/2001/israel2